Lee Sharkey on Calendars of Fire

“The writing of Calendars began with a question about pronouns: what would it take to make of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ the other I am separated from by history, ideology, religion, nationality, or gender, a ‘we’?”

“My work has long been haunted by the quest to understand why we humans do violence to each other, a question that’s impossible to answer satisfactorily but that we must continue to ask. You might say that it was both the violators and the violated (often one and the same) who inspired this book: Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, Oedipus, the imprisoners and the imprisoned in the Spanish Inquisition and in Tehran’s Evin prison, those lost in the Nazi Holocaust and in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Figures who stand on the sidelines, knowing too much, as what they have foreseen comes to pass compelled me as well…”

Read the rest here.